Nano-energetic materials (nEMs) are substances that rapidly convert chemical energy into heat and pressure-based energy when ignited by externally applied energy and consist of a nanoscale fuel and a nanoscale oxidizer.
Such NEMs, which generate high heat and pressure during initial ignition, may be applied to a variety of thermal engineering applications such as explosives, propellants, interfacial adhesives, and the like.
For initial ignition of an NEM, hot wires, mechanical impact, flames, electric sparks, and the like have typically been used.
These typical mechanical, thermal, and electrical ignition methods are very effective in ignition of nEMs, but are much affected by the ambient environment such as temperature, humidity, pressure, and the like, and necessarily require direct contact between a nEM and an external energy source, which acts as a big obstacle to application into a variety of thermal engineering systems.
To overcome these disadvantages of typical ignition methods, there is a need to develop a novel method for igniting nEMs.
Thus, a method of optically igniting a nEM has been developed. In some previous studies, research into and development of remote ignition of nEMs using a concentrated light source such as a CO2 continuous laser with a power of 10 W or more, a Nd:YAG continuous laser, or the like were conducted, and a technology for realizing ignition and explosion phenomena of an nEM using a pulsed Nd:YAG laser was proposed.
Such a high-power laser system is very effective in ignition of nEMs, but necessarily requires additional systems such as a complicated light generating device, light path control components, a cooling device, and the like to generate laser beams, and thus is large in volume and very expensive, leading to fundamentally many limitations in a variety of applications.